As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Information handling systems often include hard drives for storing instructions and data. In many information handling systems, it is desirable for hard drives to be able to communicate status information to a processor of the information handling system. For example, a processor may query a hard drive for the internal temperature of the hard drive, so that the processor may set an appropriate fan speed for appropriately cooling the hard drive. Traditional approaches of communicating drive status are “in-band” methods, in which the processor queries a hard drive for status information over an input/output (I/O) bus for which data communications between the processor and hard drive are undertaken, and the hard drive responds with status via the I/O bus. This approach requires continual polling of the hard drive status or require that the hard drive continually broadcast status information. Because such polling and/or broadcasting uses the data path of the I/O bus used for data transfer (e.g., reads and writes of data), data I/O throughput is negatively affected.